Heaven help those audiences who have never seen the play. Jamie Lloyd, having ruined Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, now ruins Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
Chekhov, asked how he would like his play performed, replied as well as possible. Hopelessly miscast and under-rehearsed, the 1896 premiere was a disaster. The St Petersburg audience thought they were going to see a farce. Chekhov was mocked and booed.
Lloyd seems to have taken his inspiration from a photograph which is reproduced in the programme and shows Chekhov sitting at a table at the first reading of The Seagull with the actors sitting and standing close around him.
Lloyd makes it very difficult to know what is going on. His miked actors remain seated throughout, only occasionally getting up to move their chair into another position. I felt I was watching a gimmicky reading of the play. The production is the least naturalistic, the least Chekhovian, I have seen. The final act is incomprehensible. Konstantin’s suicide is just a loud bang.
The set is a plywood box. The stage is bare. There are no props; not even a seagull. The actors, dressed casually in grey and bare-foot, are discovered sitting on plastic chairs with their backs to the audience. Konstantin’s play has been cut completely. In Anya Reiss’s version, the production begins when the performance of his play has just finished. Another innovation is to have the actors playing charades. Why not musical chairs?
Konstantin (Daniel Monks), the unsuccessful playwright, remains a singularly unpleasant outsider throughout. Emilia Clarke, who won many awards for her portrayal of the dragon queen in Game Of Thrones, makes her West End debut as Nina, the woman he loves. Nina is much feistier than usual.
Dying Sorin (Robert Glenister) and cynical Doctor Dorn (Gerald Kyd) are much diminished in this version. Shamrayev (Jason Barnett) and Masha (Sophie Wu) have a greater impact because there is more leeway for them to be comic in a modern way.
Indira Varma as Arkadina, Konstantin’s mother, is especially good when she is absurdly flattering Trigorin who is played as her very young and immature toyboy by Tom Rhys Harries.
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